A Crown of Lights

Past the pub, about a hundred yards out of the village centre, were eight semi-detached houses on the same side of the road.

‘That’s the estate.’ Gomer pointed, as they approached.

Merrily parked in front of the first house. Though these were once council houses, fancy gates, double glazing and new front doors showed that most of them had been purchased.

They all had candles in the windows.

Only one house, fairly central, kept its maroon, standard-issue front door and flaking metal gates. It was the only one still looking like a council house. Except for the cross on the door: wood, painted gold, and nailed on.

There was a large jeep crowding the brief drive. A sticker over a nameplate on the gate announced that Christ was the Light. In the single downstairs window, two beeswax candles burned, in trays, on Bibles.

Merrily had heard that Ellis was living in a council house because, when he’d given up his churches, he’d also given up his rectory. The Church paid the rent on this modest new manse. A small price to pay per head of congregation, and it wouldn’t do Ellis’s image any harm at all, and he would know that.

She felt a pulse of fury. From singing in tongues to erecting a wall of silence, this man had turned a whole community, dozens maybe hundreds of people, against a couple who hadn’t yet been here long enough for anyone really to know them. The Thorogoods would need to be very hard-faced to survive it.

27 Spirit of Salem

‘THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE,’ George said on the phone. ‘This is fate. We all know what tomorrow is.’

‘Probably the last day of my freaking marriage.’

‘You have to go with it, Robin. We can turn this round. We can make it a triumph.’

Robin wanted to scream that he couldn’t give a shit about Imbolc; he just wanted things to come right again with his wife, some work to bring in some money, his religious beliefs no longer to be national news. He just wanted to become a boring, obscure person.

In the background, the old fax machine huffed and whizzed. He watched the paper emerge.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

Poison faxes? Creepy Bible quotes? Someone had unleashed the Christian propaganda machine. The spirit of Salem living on.

‘It’s all our fault, man,’ George said.

‘Not your fault. Vivvie’s fault.’

‘I share the blame. I was there too. I also now share the responsibility for getting you and Betty through this.’

‘We could maybe get through this, George, if people would just leave us the fuck alone.’

He wasn’t so sure about that, though, the way Betty was behaving.

By nine a.m. the answering machine had taken calls from BBC Wales, Radio Hereford and Worcester, HTV, Central News, BBC Midlands and 5 Live. And from some flat-voiced kid who said he was a pagan too and would like to pledge his support and his magic.

Already they were starting to come to the front door. By eleven a.m., there’d been four people knocking. He hadn’t answered. Instead he’d closed the curtains and sat in the dimness, hugging the Rayburn. He’d listened to the answering machine, intercepting just this one call from George.

The whole damn story was truly out; it had been on all the radio stations and breakfast TV. Was also out on the World Wide Web, with e-mails of support – according to George – coming from Native Americans in Canada and pagans as far away as India. George claimed that already this confrontation was being seen as a rallying flashpoint for ethnic worshippers of all persuasions. Strength and courage were being transmitted to them from all over the world.

‘We don’t want it,’ Robin told George. ‘We came here for a quiet life. Pretty soon I’m gonna take the phone off the hook and unplug the fax.’

‘In that case,’ George said, ‘surely it’s better that the people you know—’

‘You mean people you know. Listen, George, just hold off, can you do that? I would need to talk to Betty.’

‘When’s she going to be back?’

‘I don’t know when she’s gonna be back. She’s mad at me. She thinks I screwed up with the Mail guys. I think I screwed up with the Mail guys. I’m mad at me.’

‘You need support, man. And there’s a lot of Craft brothers and Craft sisters who want to give you some. I tell you, there’s an unbelievable amount of strong feeling about this. It’ll be very much a question of stopping people coming out there.’

‘Well you fucking better stop them.’

‘Plus, the opposition, of course,’ George said. ‘We don’t know how many they are or where they’re coming from.’

Robin peered round the edge of the curtain at the puddles in the farmyard and along the side of the barn. It looked bleak, it looked desolate. In spite of all the courage and strength being beamed at them, it looked lonely as hell. Sure he felt vulnerable; how could he not?

When he sighed, it came out rough, with a tremor underneath it.

‘How many were you thinking?’

‘Well, we need a coven,’ George had said. ‘I’ll find eleven good people which, with you and Betty makes... the right number. We could be there by nightfall. Don’t worry about accommodation, we’ll have at least two camper vans. We’ll bring food and wine and everything we need to deck out the church for Imbolc. Be the greatest Imbolc ever, Robin. We’ll set the place alight.’

‘I dunno. I dunno what to do.’ For George this was cool, this was exciting. If you’d put it to Robin, even just a few days ago, he’d have said yeah, wow, great. It was what he’d envisaged from the start: the repaganized church becoming a centre of the old religion at the heart of a prehistoric ritual landscape. The idyll.

But this was not Betty’s vision any more – if it ever had been.

‘Leave it with me, yeah?’ George said. ‘Blessed be, man.’

‘I’m quite psychic, you know.’ Juliet Pottinger had what Betty regarded as a posh Lowland Scottish accent. ‘I was about to go into town, and then I thought, no, if I go out now I shall miss something interesting.’

Which was a better opening than Betty could have hoped for.

Lower Lodge was an extended Georgian cottage on the edge of a minor road about two miles out of Leominster and a good twenty-five miles east of Old Hindwell. Once away from Old Hindwell, Betty’s head had seemed to clear. The day was dull but dry, the temperature no worse than you could expect in late January. Out here, she felt lighter, less scared, less oppressed.

Mrs Pottinger’s house was full of books. Six bookcases in the hall, with two piles of books beside one of them, propped up by an umbrella stand. In the long kitchen, where she made Betty tea, the demands of reading and research seemed to have long since overtaken the need for food preparation. Books and box-files were wedged between pans on the shelves and under cups and plates on the dresser. The only visible cooker was a microwave, and an old Amstrad word processor with a daisywheel printer took up half the kitchen table. There was – small blessing – no sign of a Daily Mail.

Juliet Pottinger was about sixty-five, with a heavy body, layered in cardigans, and what you could only call wide hair. Her seat was a typist’s chair, which creaked when she moved. She was working, she said, on a definitive history of the mid-border.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone first,’ Betty said. ‘I just happened to be... passing.’

‘But you live at Old Hindwell, you say?’